Urban Interventions

CONTEXT AND WORK IN PROGRESS

Context.

1. The current alienation of the individual induced by a technology dominant economy is based on an urge to cut the distance over time and space in today’s communication systems. ROCKFLUID represents an attempt to investigate this context. It creates possibilities for encounters in shared physical spaces where we experience the environment through moving our body in space thus defining our places. I am interested in doing this by looking at a form of psycho-geography, adopting relational tactics, and sharing the creative process with participants. I also believe that to build an awareness of how digital time has disrupted our sense of subjective time is a key element. This can be done by breaking the accepted relation memory-past. With the current obsession over constantly documenting our lives, we may feel (and fear) that we cannot do
the same with memory. By proposing that we do change our memories in the present by recollecting them, we may find in this very quality of instability of memory our ‘place’.

2. The awareness of our position in space due to the use of technologies has changed the perception of place. We are now used to considering macro dimensions (the globe from google earth or gps systems), and less used to looking at our immediate proximities.  I would like to share this concern with audiences and generate an awareness on micro geographies, and within this on our body in space, asserting a more poetic and political aspect of everyday life and functioning as a way of personalising resistance to the globalscape. My work will aim at looking at personal space as a non verbal language of spatial intersubjectivity.

(metamodernism http://www.metamodernism.org/)

Preparation and research.
To get in touch with locally based participants willing to contribute by suggesting a location they are able to share a memory of. These suggestions are a starting point to create a series of map drawings. These, in turn, are the basis for a tour, as well as the choreography for the following interventions.


Intervention: The intervention makes the project visible to the general public, in some cases imposing over everyday activities in the area. Based on the map drawings, Cologni and volunteers (and previous participants) create a series of fluid structures in the city. A video feed shows the movement of the performers live on the web. This is a fusion of the geography of chosen places and a geometric movement of performers wearing a corner from a single stretchy coloured material through their heads. This changing shape also affects  the video produced from chosen vantage points and webcasted live together with extracts from video portraits previously produced. People wearing the fabric will come together occupying a small area and stretch back to choreographed shapes to occupy large spaces as live moving structures in the space.

Indoor, while the intervention takes place, the video produced and webcasted live, can also be viewed in a gallery space, together with the video portraits and the city map drawings, and thus have a life after the ephemeral intervention. Participants can continue the discussion started during the tour, as we aim at forming a small community of makers around this project, from different places in and outside the UK.

Studio wall 2011, Wysing Arts Centre Studio Open, July 2011

The drawings below are a small selection from the sketchbook and give an idea of how the project  evolves

the above images are from my sketchbook, 2010

From sketchbook, 2010/11, thinking at the interventions in Cambridge, UK

About ROCKFLUID


ROCKFLUID is awarded Grants for the Arts, Arts Council of England, within the Escalator Programme. ROCKFLUID is supported by Colchester Arts Centre, Wysing Arts Centre and the University of Cambridge, while opening up to other collaborating institutions.

Contact


ELENA COLOGNI
Studio: Wysing Arts Centre
Fox Road, Bourn, Cambridge, CB23 2TX
info@rockfluid.com
www.wysingartscentre.org

Supported by:


Copyright


Copyright © 2011-2016 Elena Cologni. All rights reserved.

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